Who Are you Hanging Out With?

Bernie Sanders needs 13,088 $27-buck donors to match the cost of one ticket at a Clinton-Clooney fundraiser

Bernie Sanders would need 13,088 individual donors at $27 a pop to match the whopping $353,400 ticket price for one couple’s seat at a Clinton fundraiser hosted by the Clooneys next month. He would need 1,237 individual donors – again, at $27 a pop – to match the $33,400 it’ll cost attendees at a smaller Clooney fundraising event in April. And yet, all year, Bernie Sanders, with his populist movement giving an average of $27 bucks, has been steadily out-fundraising Clinton. In January, Bernie raised $20 million to Clinton’s $15 million. In February, Bernie raised $43.5 million to Clinton’s $30 mil. And in March, as Vox reported, “Bernie Sanders’s well-oiled fundraising machine is showing no signs of slowing down.”

Let’s put this obscene Clinton fundraising money in perspective. For the cost of one seat purchased for around $350,000 by a filthy-rich person, payment for the privilege of sharing a table for a few hours with another filthy rich person, Hillary Clinton, The Soup Kitchen could feed 304,655 people. The fact that Hillary Clinton has no shame about headlining this type of event so she can grab as much cash as possible (to fund her return to the stump, where she’ll again paint herself as a fighter for us) is the best evidence yet that she is both tone-deaf, elitist and the least likely person on the planet to ever consider what average people are going through, day after day. Sharing tables with the uber-rich is where the Clintons now find themselves in life, after the tens of millions they’ve made speaking to corporate this and Wall Street that, along with the millions Clinton herself made on her book deal, and after who the hell knows how much cash from who the hell knows where. Hillary Clinton’s attempts now to convince a country full of struggling people that she’s the one who’ll be fighting for us is repulsive on its face. Take a look at these two candidates, a very close, hard look. Hillary Clinton is the million-dollar-dinner, while Bernie Sanders is more Soup Kitchen – and proud of it. What’s most audacious is that Clinton, on the stump, brags about her millions of “small” donations, while simultaneously traveling in the upper echelons of this country’s highest society and cravenly accepting their maxed-out donations. If growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, didn’t necessarily make her a Blue Blood, her years of hobnobbing with this country’s elites to further her enormous political ambition have created, to some, the illusion that she was born to nobility. Clinton has happily adopted that illusion as a birthright, and evidently sees no contradiction in painting herself as a populist while she comfortably, happily, dines with the ultra-rich, and chats briefly with the peasants at campaign-stop diners. Bernie Sanders’ net worth is a fraction of Clinton’s, after decades of toiling quietly in the service of this country, on behalf of you and me. There’s a reason Bernie Sanders didn’t have huge name recognition when he first launched his campaign: His first thought was never the media cameras; his first thought has always been, and is now, about quietly, without fanfare, fighting the good fight against corruption and injustice.

Bernie has no Wall Street money, no Super PACs. Individual donors in the millions have contributed to his ballooning campaign coffers. (Of course, no article about Bernie’s success is complete without at least a little low-level naysaying – detractors will note that he’s out-spending Clinton, as well – and yeah, that happens when you have to basically market yourself, introduce yourself and build your own brand to millions of registered voters with no help from the media). But again, Bernie is doing just that: He’s drawing stupendous crowds everywhere he goes, tens of thousands, as compared with Clinton’s events (at last count maxing out at 5,500 on a good day); he’s launched the purest form of a grassroots movement; and despite what you read in nearly every mainstream media headline, there’s no sign that it’s slowing down. This isn’t about politics: Bernie Sanders has caused people to think about the plight of millions of Americans, to look at ways the government can work for us again, to creatively address ways to ease the struggle for so many people, people without access to hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a meal with an arrogant narcissist. Clinton alluded recently to Bernie Sanders being the latest “flavor of the week.” While the flavor may not be lobster bisque and filet mignon, many people are finding that flavor to be very palatable indeed. Clinton’s snarky dismissal of Bernie Sanders – a man who was literally on the front lines while Clinton was a Goldwater Girl, sitting silently on the board of Wal-Mart, and involving herself in scandal after scandal – and his calls for justice, fairness, and equality, is an insult to us all.

It’s important to pay attention to all this, right now, while there’s still time for Clinton supporters to pull the plug on their smug, arrogant, elitist, tone-deaf, entitled candidate, and draft the right guy for the nomination. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be caught dead at a fund-raising event that cost upwards of $350,000, and everyone needs to think about that. Bernie has garnered such loyal support that his is the “most populist campaign-funding process ever employed by a candidate for President of the United States.” Seth Abramson of the Huffington post asks, “Does Bernie deserve a medal for this? No. But how about some television coverage? How about that $140 million figure being every bit as big — and historic — a political news story as anything Donald Trump has done or said since June of 2015? How is a single Donald Trump tweet about Heidi Cruz worth about as much airtime as the most amount of money raised by a grassroots political campaign in the history of — well, I’ll say it because it’s true — human civilization?”